Farnam Jahanian, the Assistant Director for CISE, testified at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing on May 25th. The hearing, convened jointly by the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation and the Subcommittee on Research and Science Education, examined Federal agency efforts to improve our nation’s cybersecurity and prepare the future cybersecurity talent needed for preserving national security. As part of his testimony, Jahanian listed a series of contributions the computing research community has made with support from NSF and other Federal funding agencies: Cryptographic schemes and cryptographic-based authentication, enabling today’s Internet commerce, supporting secure digital signatures and online credit card transactions Program analyses and verification techniques, enabling the early detection of […]

Some research news last Friday that’s been the subject of much chatter in the popular press: Caltech researchers Lulu Qian and Eric Winfree — who holds a joint appointment in computer science and bioengineering — were able to get 74 molecules of DNA to take the square root of a number and round the result to the nearest integer. It isn’t a big number (the largest is 15). It isn’t particularly fast (the calculation takes about 10 hours). And it isn’t the first biochemical circuit ever to be assembled (Winfree and his colleagues first built something like this back in 2006). But it’s noteworthy because it is the first circuit capable […]

The following is a special contribution to this blog by Cindy L. Bethel, a 2009 Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) working with Brian Scassellati in the Social Robotics Laboratory at Yale University. Cindy received her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Florida in 2009 under the direction of co-advisors Robin Murphy and Larry Hall. Her research focuses on the areas of human-robot interaction and social robotics. Click here for more information about Cindy, or here for more details about the CIFellows Project. Entering the workforce following the support and protection of graduate school can be challenging. These challenges were compounded by a difficult economy with limited […]

The NSF’s CISE and Biological Sciences (BIO) directorates have joined forces to seek interdisciplinary proposals that further the frontiers of both fields. In a recent Dear Colleague Letter (DCL) for Biological and Computing Shared Principles: The [BIO and CISE directorates] invite proposals that advance research focused on principles shared between the two disciplines. Proposals that include sustained, synergistic collaborations, leading to new advances in both disciplines, will be the most competitive. Proposals should address shared principles that contribute to conceptual advances in both biology and computing. We recognize that new ideas are emerging rapidly at the crossroads of the biological sciences and computing, and we encourage investigators to pursue novel focus […]

From this week’s IEEE Spectrum: According to doctors at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center… intensive care units backed up by off-site doctors and nurses, who could remotely monitor critically ill patients and direct the ICU’s on-site staff, had fewer patient deaths and shorter ICU stays. Their trial of a so-called tele-ICU system, which allows intensive care specialists outside the hospital to see and hear patients, monitor vital signs, and access medical records, proves that such a system actually benefits patients.   Over the two-and-a-half-year study, off-site doctors and nurses manned multimonitor computer stations from a nearby building, where they received real-time information on patients. The UMass tele-ICU system is based on Philips’ Visicu […]

The U.S. Department of Energy — together with the Government of India — recently established a Joint Clean Energy Research and Development Center (JCERDC) “designed to promote clean energy innovation by teams of scientists and engineers from India and the United States.” DoE is committing $25 million to the Center over the next five years. The first JCERDC solicitation was issued earlier this month, with a focus on three priority areas. At least one of these — building energy efficiency — specifically aligns with computing research: The objective is to contribute to dramatic improvements in the energy efficiency of buildings (commercial or residential) in the United States and India. Recommended topics include: building […]